There’s no denying that technology has evolved with huge advancements and is continuing to do the same. Simulating vision with a virtual experience has now become possible due to the evolving concepts of Augmented and Virtual Realities (AR/VR). Through these realities, businesses are simplifying the processes of various industries and taking them to a new level. In 2016, 88% of companies were using or planned to use AR/VR. But, 63% of them did not have in-house resources to develop AR/VR projects and 55% of them planned to outsource AR/VR development. With a mission of making better realities, an AR/VR based company, Paracosma Inc. stepped into the market to provide outsourced solutions, skills, and its own in-house products to both small and large customers.
Headquartered in California, Paracosma Inc is a Delaware Corporation with its additional sales and technology office in Tokyo and its primary research and development center in Kathmandu, Nepal. Its services include content creation, application development, and project implementation across the broad range of AR & VR platforms. Additionally, the company creates its own content in the gaming, entertainment, tourism, enterprise and education/training spaces. It also has proprietary technology for producing, viewing, managing and distributing 360-degree photo and video content.
Comprehensive Set of Offerings
Paracosma has a broad range of offerings across AR and VR. It has developed an enterprise AR platform that is being used for machine maintenance and training for large global manufacturing and food processing companies along with product assembly and quality assurance for a leading electronics capital equipment manufacturer. The company has worked on AR to demonstrate advanced features and in-home viewing of products for an international durable goods manufacturer. It also produces video holograms, 3D objects, characters, animations and AR effects, for various clients including a leading home goods retailer, a consumer facing AR application, and a national telecommunications company.
Paracosma has developed its own open-ended sandbox VR game, called Unnamed VR, launching for Christmas 2018. The setting is a large house in which all objects are interactive and each room offers opportunities for exploration and playing mini-games. These include an adventure room with trampolines, zip lines, climbing walls; shooting galleries; graffiti spray painting room; and many more. Each of these interactions also can serve as the basis for enterprise training and simulation scenarios.
Paracosma has created VR demos of a smart city command center. The company provides photogrammetry reconstructions of major settings such as the Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu. It has also developed a VR copresence application that allows multi-user remote collaboration in shared environments for enterprise customers. Apart from these, it also offers a full range of 360-degree photo and video services including its own in-house production, filming and postproduction services, and white-label online and app-based distribution platform for 360 photos and videos.
The Bleeding Edge
The ingenious mind behind the inception of Paracosma is its Founder and CEO, Ken Ehrhart. He has been in technology research for 22 years, a partner in Venture Capital for 18 years and has focused on international market expansion for over 8 years. Thus, he brings a wealth of experience in growing early stage companies on a global basis. Paracosma has been built from the start as an international company serving the two largest enterprise markets in the world, the US and Japan. With the strong belief in the inevitable ubiquity of AR and VR accessible virtually free through smartphones, but understanding the difficulty of timing breakthrough market expansion, the Founder’s goal has been to build a company with a long-term horizon and broad and deep technical capability, so that it would be positioned for ongoing success as the markets matured.
A One-stop-shopping Platform
According to Paracosma, the AR and VR sectors are proving to be remarkable for a vast array of startup companies. But, due to high capital requirements of traditional technology centers such as Silicon Valley and San Francisco, most AR/VR startups focus on a very narrow segment of the industry and have just a small number of engineers supporting that segment. Due to its low-cost, high-quality offshore development team, Paracosma has been building a larger team focused across more segments. Thus, it can offer clients a full range of services that would not typically be available from a single service provider. The company is a one-stop-shopping platform for AR/VR services at industry leading pricing.
The AR/VR sectors are evolving very rapidly with new platforms and innovations coming very fast. This makes it challenging for small in-house teams to keep up with the advancements. With a rapidly expanding team, Paracosma can focus on all major AR and VR platforms instead of focusing on just one or two. It also has the potential to establish new R&D in multiple promising areas. With low-costs, this breadth of focus enables it to work with clients who have visions for what the technology will enable in the future and to build a long-term partnership that takes advantage of new capabilities as they evolve. Many competitors are forced to take a narrower, short-term view and miss the opportunity to grow in partnership with their clients as technology catches up to their visions. Currently, AR/VR are terribly hard to develop, to distribute and to access. Paracosma is focused on the future in which those barriers begin to fade and is seeking the solutions to simplify AR/VR.
Providing an Affordable Access Point
It has been fascinating to watch the early evolution of the AR/VR marketplace. According to Paracosma, a couple of years ago, most companies realized that they should care about AR/VR. But, they had little conception of what the technology could actually do and how difficult and expensive it could be to implement their vision. From those early days of generic inquiries, clients have matured to a much clearer understanding of the technology and the technology itself is evolving very quickly to catch up to some of those early visions. Providing a low-cost partnership for exploring AR and VR has enabled clients to easily test the technology and experiment and explore the potential for their businesses. Research has shown that once companies begin trying AR/VR, all of them intend to continue investing in the technologies, while those that have not tried it are far more skeptical. Paracosma provides an affordable access point to realize that value.
Moving towards Sustainable Growth
Considering the future of AR/VR, Paracosma believes that it is virtually limitless. But, the opportunities within these virtual worlds are as broad as the opportunities within the real world and that makes it very difficult to know the future. The aspects of consumers’ and business clients’ experiences that will be enhanced and augmented by the addition of virtual elements and the ones that remain a real-world focus, are difficult to pre-judge. So, AR/VR companies with a narrow focus may find it difficult to create and maintain a critical mass of business. A few will guess right and succeed and many will guess wrong, either the segment or the timing, and fail. But, companies with a broad range of skills that remain sustainable due to low costs will have the ability to service the market segments that evolve and thrive, without worrying about betting on the wrong horse.
Paracosma is focused on its continued sustainable growth. In addition to its direct client base, the company is increasingly becoming a low-cost service provider for other AR/VR companies. It is expanding ongoing supplier relationships with its clients. One upcoming milestone will be the launch of its consumer VR game, Unnamed VR. Success for the product, will allow an expansion of Paracosma’s direct to end-user product offerings. Paracosma has also increased its footprint in Tokyo and anticipates growing revenues from Japan. A third focus will be the launch of VR copresence collaboration for enterprise clients, while focusing on the continued expansion of its enterprise AR platform.
URL: paracosma.com
